Luis Núñez Ladevéze
FIJET España
Catedrático en Periodismo
55th FIJET CONGRESS IN Marocoo
World Federation of Travel Journalists and Writers
Though having famous precedents, the practice of
“tourism” has not become a collective habit until the world has become a global
society, connected by the media. Long time ago, perhaps not in such remote
times, there have been famous tourists. They used to belong to the high class,
to blood, money or cultural aristocracy. Mary Godwin wrote Frankenstein while
she was practicing tourism at the Genève Lake. John Keats left for Italy to
cure his lungs. Frederik Chopin lived in Mallorca before destroying his. Washington
Irving adopted the bewitching of the Alhambra as a topic for his tales. Gordon
Bennet Jr. made Paris the capital of his sports adventures.
There have always been pedestrians and nomads in all times since we were expelled from Paradise. Cain represents the type of traveler who never comes back to his origin. Throughout the years, many have followed his example. They left and never went back. However, in a universal society, tourists have become both a distinguished and popular species. They belong to those who leave and soon return to their starting point. They are the living metaphor of the fact that the world turns out to be more accessible for everybody as it becomes more agglutinating and global.
Tourists are a friendly and exclusive contribution
from the global society. They promote the interchange among men, nature and
culture. They humbly admit that their environment is limited. They appreciate
what is not theirs as if it were of their own. They admire the qualities of the
neighboring men; they are ready to understand different mentalities. Tourism
grows from relying in those who are different. It rises from admitting that
one’s habitat is small and, that, for a curious soul, it is well worth
completing it with knowledge and experience from what is beyond one’s place.
They are invited to the journey by the necessity to expand their narrow horizon
and the savoring other sceneries that will enrich the limited experience of
their ordinary life.
As in any deal, tourism is also as advantageous for
those who offer it as for those who receive it. Touristic exchanges replace the
wish for domination of the powerful for the Epicurean excitement of moving. It
makes ones’ own what belongs to others without mastering it. It provides
interest for keeping relations, grows with friendliness, develops with
understanding, makes courtesy a common quality and becomes prosperous with good
intentions.
Tourists are generous visitors assimilating what is
worthy and valuable in every circumstance. This trading activity combines
sensitive and contemplative delectation was originated in an illustrated
society. Romantics were the pioneers, aesthetic aristocrats, adventurer poets,
or both things. Baroness Stein used to receive letters from Goethe at Weimar,
when he was in Italy in the same way as many people who have moved from the
East to the West receive cards from tourists visiting Rome. As in all
businesses in a consumer society, the pleasure of the heights ends by diluting
in ordinary people’s hobbies.
The result of Communication with what is different;
the touristic transit opens the physical route to global Communication when
virtual Communication was not predictable yet. A recent phenomenon, the
threshold of globalization, it evidences that curiosity and human contact can
overcome the barriers built by the greed of power and bellicose impulse to
domination of some over the others. It is true that, before the existence of
tourists, there were already travelers pushed by their cognitive anxiety, the
interest for communicating and enquiring in exchange for nothing but visual
enjoyment and contact with the environment.
These and other precedents show that the touristic
experience has a private, exclusive and selective origin. If they are
considered as antecedents, they prove that if good things have restricted
access in their beginning, they are democratic when they become the object of
industry or commerce. Following Lucretius, Wouldn’t we like to repeat: “I like
discovering untouched fountains and drink from them; I like collecting recent
flowers and look for an elegant garland for my forehead where no one had
collected them before”[2]?
But this has been a pleasure for a few, when the world was too wide and poets
used to sing to the golden age. As far as tourism is concerned, the idea that
what is good spreads by itself is not only true but allows to value touristic
traffic as the feature most democratically spread and beneficial of
globalization, be it material or virtual.
Tourism is a personal choice open from a few to
all. The business calls individuals to share it with majorities. Instead of traffic of goods, the tourist
voluntarily becomes in object of traffic. Its wish does not despise its
condition of person but elevates him to taste an experience restricted to a few
up to now. It started as a hobby for some privileged, not those forced by
adversity. Cain may have well been the first tourist in history if he had not
been forced to travel because of the incompatibility of its conscience to live
with his family. His departure contributes to the confusion of languages. Both
Adam and Eve were also cast form Paradise against their will. They were
expelled for God’s anger, not for the wish for adventure or ambition in
knowledge. The tourist washes Cain’s sin by travelling for his own desire. It
is a remedy to Adam’s malediction coming back to its starting point and manages
to create a universal language by incorporating gestures, signs, moods and
rituals that observes and spells in the Babelian fragmentation.
Touristic moving comes from the trend to discover
an unknown landscape and culture, led by the interest for what is different and
the pleasure of variety. No political or ideological reason is behind it and
cannot be compared with the proposal of promoting an alliance among civilizations.
It is not an artificial contact responding to a plan or a scheme. Alliances
have a goal, need to be promoted by an individual and are focused on a program
whose promoters share. As tourism is a spontaneous movement, it is not related
to a previous project. It is, in itself, evidence that the coexistence of
civilizations is possible without the need of imposing it, conventions or
programmed adjustments. It does not express an alliance but it does show the
feasibility of dialogue among people living in different cultures. The exchange
of ideas and ways of living has become an everyday fact through the experience
of contact among people who connect separate worlds, without the need of being
promoted by political plans or ideological impositions, thanks to tourism.
A trip which was only accessible for privileged
people has now become a practice at the reach of any. Touristic activities have
exceeded all frontiers, enhanced by the proximity that the mass media offer. We
can all become accidental tourists in a part of a common world where distances
have disappeared while some are determined to increase discrepancies among
identities when communication and tourism are reducing them.
Thanks to globalization, as a result of
technological innovation in communications and transport, the incommensurable
sphere has evolved to a measurable world, less reluctant and more familiar,
less hostile and more passable than what it was in the past. The extraordinary,
once limited to a scarce number of pioneers is now at the reach of the ordinary
man. The tourist is the usual passenger of this surrounded world. There are no
longer places whose distance may make its access to it.
The most remote is searched because it has been
previously felt as familiar. Tourism has made coexistence among human beings
closer and shared. There is nothing beyond the limits. Tourism will find
anything existing in the world.
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